Mask Maker
Bacolod producer of papier mache masks grows his business with help from the Association of Negros Producers
By Mishell M. Malabaguio
Desperate to keep his floundering five-year-old printing press business in Bacolod City afloat, Marianito "Jojo" Vito Jr. tried to diversify into several products on top of just accepting printing jobs.
This was in 2005, after a member of the Association of Negros Producers (ANP) invited him to display his products in the city's ANP Showroom. Vito, then 37, had quickly and absentmindedly accepted the offer although he really had not even one tangible product to display for his company, Papyrus Prints Co. The printing press had been running at a loss and, to make ends meet, Vito had to augment his income by teaching management and entrepreneurship at La Consolacion College in the same city.
With no money at all to invest, all he could think of was to produce paper bags out of his available raw material inventory. Simply to test the market, therefore, he produced 100 pieces of paper bags, printed the label "Bacolod Bacolod" on them, then registered the product under the Vito Prints & Pieces brand.
To his surprise, the paper bags sold out fast at the ANP Showroom. This encouraged him to produce more of them, adding as an extra feature either ceramic tags or tags quoting verses from the Bible. However, although the paper bags remained such a fast-moving item, Vito realized after three months that his income from them could not even pay for just the showroom rentals. The only saving grace for the business was that the ANP did not charge rentals to showroom users for the first two months.
Recalls Vito: "The demand for the product was high but not high enough to cover the overhead costs. This was because I was just selling at P35 to P96 apiece depending on the size, giving me a margin of only 25 percent. Most of this margin just went to the pay of my workers."
So Vito wracked his brains to come up with something that could be truly profitable. "At that time, kailangan ko na talaga ng totoong product [I needed a real product more than ever], but my problem was that I just didn't have the money to start with," he says. All he knew was that he needed a product that he could make given his current meager resources, and one that could best relate to Bacolod City in particular.
Finally, the idea of producing papier mache masks came to him. Vito thought of it because Bacolod City has a 25-year-old annual celebration in October, the MassKara festival, that features weekend-long street dance competitions among colorful masked dancers.
Vito explains why he settled for producing the masks: "The market is really flooded with masks during the MassKara festival, but I just thought that there just might be a market for the masks if I produced them all year round. Of course, I also had the nagging fear that the masks might just turn out to be a seasonal product after all."
